WP6: Supporting social and informal learning

Objectives
The main objective of this theme is the development and validation of services to support social and
informal learning by:
- improving the creation of personalized content and the knowledge discovery
- allowing for decentralization and co-operation of content management
- creating communities of learners on the basis of their learning needs and interests.
More specifically, we will support informal and social learning by:
1. setting the basis for a knowledge sharing network which can be used to support the emergence of new common knowledge;
2. creating a link between the formal representation of a given domain in the form of ontologies (which allows for easy retrieval and reuse of the learning material) and the informal descriptions produced by social tagging and folksonomies (which allow for the inclusion of the appreciation people express for different kinds of material and thus identify their needs and interests).

Description of work
This work package is concerned with the creation of an appropriate methodology to support social and informal learning through the development of services that are based on the interaction between a formal representation of (domain) knowledge and a social component which complements it. The services provided in this workpackage bring together work in argument visualization in CSCL (e.g. Knowledge Forum and Belvedere) and a formal representation of the domain and knowledge construction. It is expected that this combination will improve learner interaction as well as the knowledge co-construction.
Participants: UU, UTU, PUB-NCIT, IPP-BAS